What Twelve Stones Teach a Household About Remembering

A household remembers what it can see, so God told Israel to stack stones where their children would ask about them. Picture your kitchen counter on a Saturday morning: a calendar, a stack of mail, a few school forms, a coffee mug. Everything the week demands is visible, and nothing there yet records what God carried your family through this year.

C.H.E.W. with Me

New here? What is CHEW? — a 30-second practice that grows into a day woven with God’s love.

C – Clarity: A Counter Full of Deadlines and No Record of Mercy

You probably track results with precision: quarterly numbers, calendars, goals. Most households have a system for what is due and none for what has been given. The gap is not that your family has forgotten God’s goodness. It is that memory fades without a marker, and children, friends, and even adults tend to remember what they can point to.

H – Hear: What God says

“And Joshua said to them, ‘Pass on before the ark of the Lord your God into the midst of the Jordan, and take up each of you a stone upon his shoulder, according to the number of the tribes of the people of Israel, that this may be a sign among you. When your children ask in time to come, ‘What do those stones mean to you?’ then you shall tell them that the waters of the Jordan were cut off before the ark of the covenant of the Lord. When it passed over the Jordan, the waters of the Jordan were cut off. So these stones shall be to the people of Israel a memorial forever.'” (Joshua 4:5-7)

Israel has just crossed the Jordan on dry ground. God tells Joshua to have one man from each of the twelve tribes lift a stone from the riverbed and carry it to their first campsite (Joshua 4:2–3, 19–20). The stones are not decoration. They are built to prompt a question: “What do those stones mean to you?”

The word “memorial” is zikkaron, from zakar, which in Hebrew means to remember in a way that acts, not merely to recall a fact. The stone serves memory by setting a visible prompt where the family walks. And what it prompts is the story of rescue: the waters of the Jordan cut off before the ark of the covenant, God’s faithfulness made visible in a riverbed.

That is love with a paper trail. God does not only rescue; He commands that the rescue be kept in view, because His love is meant to be remembered, retold, and passed down. A household that tells that story is not performing nostalgia. It is standing where Israel stood, looking at the stones.

A jar of index cards on the kitchen counter can do for your household what twelve stones did for Israel: keep what God did from being forgotten.

E – Exchange: Hoping They Remember for Building the Reminder

The belief worth trading is that your household will remember God’s faithfulness without any marker, because it was obvious at the time. Trade it for the instruction in Joshua 4: set up something to make God’s love visible.

Because God’s love is always worth remembering and calling to mind, how does that change how I encourage my household to remember God’s love?

W – Walk: Write the First Card Before Lunch

In the next five minutes, write one index card: today’s date, one specific way God carried your household this year, and the sentence “This was loving because ___.” Put it in a jar, bowl, or frame somewhere your household passes daily, and invite everyone at the table to add one. If you live alone or your children are grown, put the jar where friends or a small group will see it, and ask them to add cards too.

Closing question: What do you most want your household to remember about God this year?